Cara Brown McCormick
Ana Kasparian, co-host and executive producer of The Young Turks, offered a blunt critique from the left of California Governor Gavin Newsom's record on crime during a recent appearance on CNN, arguing that his handling of public safety policy has undermined the state's own voters.
In a clip being widely circulated online, Kasparian said:
"I will concede that Gavin Newsom's leadership in California has been a complete and utter disaster. He changes his ideology depending on what he thinks is fresh and what's hip at any given moment. Seventy-six percent of Californians voted in favor of something known as Prop 36, which is to roll back some of the soft-on-crime policies. That requires funding. [Newsom] has been pushing back on adequately funding the efforts to essentially roll back those policies."
Asked whether she believed it was important to invest in fighting crime, Kasparian replied without hesitation: "100 percent yes."
She went on to argue that Newsom's approach has fallen short even by the left's own standards, saying the state got early prison closures instead of the substantive reforms progressives had hoped for:
"I think the left wanted prison reform. The left wanted better police training. The left wanted real reforms where people aren't getting shot as they're running away from cops, unarmed. What we got instead was the premature closure of four prisons. Gavin Newsom is preparing to shut down the fifth state prison. As a result, the county [jails] are full to the brim of inmates, and then what they do is they end up releasing people early because they don't have room for them."
The Young Turks is one of the largest and longest-running progressive news outlets online.
"Defund the police" was the rallying cry from the party's activist left in 2020, but now Kasparian is making the opposite argument: that closing prisons hasn't worked, leaving facilities full and forcing early releases.
Her comments add an influential voice from the left to the criticism of Newsom's record on prisons as he gears up for a 2028 campaign for President.
State budget estimates show Prop 36 is expected to add more than 1,500 people to the prison population once fully in effect. Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Macomber has testified before lawmakers that closing a prison doesn't reduce how many people the state is holding; it just relocates them.
“The downside of prison closures, it does impact public safety,” Macomber said.
“The folks at that prison that gets closed, the incarcerated, they don’t go home. I move them to other prisons. They go on wait lists for rehab and programming. We add more overcrowding, more double-celling, more challenges.”
“If we want to reinvent our system, we need more interaction, more rehab programs for our population,” Macomber said at a hearing in March.
Newsom has closed four state prisons since taking office: facilities in Blythe and Tracy, one in Susanville, and the state ended its contract with a privately run prison in Kern County. A fifth, the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, Riverside County, is already closing and is expected to shut down by October, bringing the total to five.
Kasparian’s stat on the Prop 36 vote needs a small correction. She said 76 percent of voters approved it. The certified result was 68.4 percent, still a landslide, just not quite as large as she said.
Proposition 36 garnered majority support in all 58 counties and had the highest overall vote share of the ten measures on the November 2024 ballot—an unprecedented level of statewide agreement on a criminal justice policy.